Tuesday, May 27, 2014

The Chinese
government is pushing domestic banks to remove high-end servers made by
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and replace them with a local brand,
according to people familiar with the matter, in an escalation of the dispute
with the U.S.
over spying claims.

Government
agencies, including the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, are
reviewing whether Chinese commercial banks’ reliance on IBM servers compromises
the country’s financial security, said the four people, who asked not to be
identified because the review hasn’t been made public.

The review
fits a broader pattern of retaliation after American prosecutors indicted five Chinese
military officers for allegedly hacking into the computers of U.S. companies
and stealing secrets. Last week, China’s
government said it will vet technology companies operating in the country,
while the Financial Times reported May 25 that China
ordered state-owned companies to cut ties with U.S. consulting firms.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

It is
getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This
opens fascinating possibilities—and alarming ones

Nov 16th 2013 | SAN FRANCISCO

ABOUT
halfway through Dave Eggers’s bestselling dystopian satire on Silicon Valley,
“The Circle”, the reader meets Stewart, a bald, silent, stooped 60-year-old who
has “been filming, recording, every moment of his life now for five years”.
Stewart is the first of the novel’s characters to make all his actions visible
to anyone with a computer who cares to look—the first “transparent man”.